Republic

A republic is a form of government in which the state is considered a public matter, res publica, rather than the private concern or property of its rulers, with supreme political authority held, at least formally, by the people or their elected representatives rather than by a hereditary monarch, and with a head of state who holds office other than through heredity, typically through election or appointment for a defined term. The concept and the term originate in ancient Rome, where the Roman Republic, established according to tradition in 509 BC following the overthrow of the Roman Kingdom, distributed political power among elected magistrates, including two annually elected consuls, and deliberative bodies including the Senate and various popular assemblies, a system that endured for nearly five centuries before giving way to the imperial Principate. Republican government was revived as a major political model during the Renaissance in Italian city-states including Venice, Florence and Genoa, and again during the Enlightenment, influencing the founding of the modern United States as a republic in the 1770s and 1780s and the French Republic established following the 1789 French Revolution, after which republicanism spread widely as a dominant global form of state organization through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Republics today take various institutional forms, including presidential republics, in which the head of state and head of government are combined in a single directly or indirectly elected president, and parliamentary republics, in which a largely ceremonial president coexists with a head of government drawn from and accountable to an elected legislature, and the term is used in ordinary political usage in explicit contrast to monarchy.